an exercise in personal knowledge management

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Monthly Archives: August 2015

Last week Jessica Reingold of the University of Mary Washington suggested that educational institutions committed to personal student domains should make students’ development of such spaces a gradual process. I asked how such a process might apply to younger netizens, since I have a couple at home and have been thinking about this.Jessica made an argument that surprised me. I’d summarize it thusly, although by all means go read Jessica’s post and make up your own mind as to how shoddy a job of summarizing I have done.

Adolescents say, write, and express many things they later regret (sometimes not all that much later in the grand scheme of things).

Between the Internet Archive , Google and like entities, everything published to the public web is both public and permanent.

Therefore, putting stuff on the public web before you are, say, 20, is a bad idea.

It struck me how Jessica’s suggestion puts “first blog post” in the same age range as “first vote” and “first (legal) alcoholic beverage” as the sort of event that goes along with no longer being a minor. Tim Berners-Lee referred to the notion of an “age of digital majority” in a 1996 speech. To the extent there is an age of internet majority, existing law sets it much lower. Current US law allows a 13 year old to sign up for a website without written parental permission. My kids are about that age, which is why I’m thinking about this issue now. Even setting aside the many children younger than 13 who have all sorts of social media accounts, this raises some questions.

Jessica suggests that young people should wait to have a permanent web presence until after society has judged them to have enough judgement to drive a car, vote in elections, or join the armed forces. Why set the bar so high? She writes:

Adolescents are still developing and discovering who they are (I’m still discovering who I am and i’ve finished my undergraduate degree!) and I’d imagine it’d be difficult to develop a digital identity without some sort of foothold on what you’d want that to be and if you’d want it to mimic your in-person identity or not.

Even though I’m middle aged by most measures, I know that my identity is still developing. How does one decide one’s identity is stable enough to document?

When the notion of personal digital identity is introduced can also have an effect on the digital habits a person develops. Jessica asserts that for new college students, “Sticking them with the task of trying to create a digital identity that’s not in the form of preset social media norms is like asking them to have multiple existential crises.” Perhaps the difficulty she mentions here happens because, by the time we discuss with a young person the notion of digital identity, they are well trained feeders of the Facebook, Twitter and Google data mines. Is there an opportunity to start the process earlier so that a young person learns the habits of digital identity building , even if they are highly scaffolded, instead of those of preset social media norms?

Let me continue with a caveat that is big enough it probably should have been at the top of the post rather than buried 500 words down. The questions I’m asking and Jessica is, to her credit, trying to answer are not questions I had to deal with as an adolescent. I was over Jessica’s suggested age threshold at the dawn of the public web, and was over 30 before I made my first blog post.

Even so I wonder if Jessica’s cautious approach may unintentionally limit the extent to which a young person internalizes digital identity building. Alan Kay is reported to have said , “Technology is everything invented after you were born.” Does waiting until someone is 19 or 20 make it more likely that digital identity tools will feel like technology per Kay’s definition?

Unlike Jessica, I’m not sure to go about all this. The model she proposes has, I think, a good sense of progression from simpler to more complex tasks. I do wonder how well tying the process to formal entities like majors and courses will hold up in the long run. As I’ve worked on my digital footprint, I’ve consciously kept it disconnected from institutional affiliations. As one moves through life, these come and go, and I worry that content tied closely to an affiliation long past will be effectively orphaned.

Looking back at this, it reads much more like a rebuttal than I intended it, but I’ll leave it out here anyway, hoping it will expand the conversation.

Yesterday, Mike Caulfied pondered how one might replace blog comments with something more connective by replacing them with annotated links, I think he was being purposefully provocative since he titled it a “…..Proposal for Killing Comments….” Neverthelss, I think there’s a lot to be said for the idea that publishing platforms should encourage less dialogue and more broad conversation. This goes back to Mike’s thought about tools that help people “geek out” virtually.

His choice of the term “annotated links” was important because it made me think of another annotation project that I played with yesterday , hypothes.is, which counts Jon Udell of elmcity fame among its team members. Collaborative annotation of the has for a long time been a feature just on the verge of changing everything, even before it was diigo’s killer feature.

At first glance hypothesis has much to recommend it. There’s already a github repository, and the software is designed to run in a docker container, so running one’s own instance on a VPS should be straightforward, an important thing for anyone who lived through the life, death, and undeath of delicious. Hypothesis is also working on Browsertrix, software that archives a web page when it’s annotated. After all, your brilliant annotations aren’t much use if the page disappears. Federation is further down the roadmap, but a self hosted annotation server that would archive annotated documents and communicate with other servers that were doing the same thing looks to be not too far off.

This isn’t quite what Mike is talking about, but I wonder, based on the maxim “Don’t re-invent the wheel unless you have to,” how the two might fit together. Hypothesis,especially if you imagine a single user instance, seems very close to a recreation of Vannevar Bush’s memex, with electronic storage replacing microfiche. It also shares characteristics with fedwiki, a project Mike has championed for a couple of years now, with the added benefit of maintaining copies of the source materials. I can imagine a research workflow where high level idea processing , outlining and drafting, happened in fedwiki with links to hypothesis annotated, browsertrix archived web pages (digital notecards) for documentation. Build federation into both ends and you could allow individuals and groups to create and document research publicly all the way through the process.

I just read Jennifer Granick’s Black Hat keynote. I highly recommend it. I want to focus on one thing that Granick unpacked. In discussing the history of technology law, she mentioned numerous instances from the present and past where policymakers propose and make law and/or policy even when their understanding of the technology and its history is poor.

A particularly salient example is the renewed call for law enforcement encryption backdoors. I have yet to find any technical experts who even think such a thing will work, never mind be a good idea. Unfortunately, many of the policymakers who will decide this issue are not known for their technical acumen.

Looking at the big picture, the question is something like this: “In a democratic society, how much do policymakers and the public at large need to know about technology in order for society to make informed decisions about the policies and laws that govern it?” Unless the answer is “almost nothing,” we aren’t doing what we need to do.

Consider computer survey courses for undergraduates. They are almost always tightly focused on technology as tool. How do you send an email or make a spreadsheet? As I think about it, this makes quite a bit of sense. One must understand at least what a piece of technology can do before one can have a very thoughtful discussion about what it ought to do and not do. Unfortunately, that second discussion is rare.

For example, a discussion of remote device kill and wipe functionality points out their value if keeping sensitive data out of the hands of bad actors is more important than recovering a lost or stolen device. It does not, however, address the question of whether the device manufacturer, the wireless carrier the device uses, or the government should be capable (by design) and/or allowed (by law and policy) to trigger a kill or wipe without the device owner’s consent and/or knowledge.

A discussion of the history of the Internet leads Granick to the almost inevitable comparison of “hacker” culture, with its emphasis on tinkering and openness, and the expectations of safety and turnkey operation that more recent Internet arrivals expect. As this year’s Beloit Mindset List points out, traditional college freshmen don’t remember a time before online shopping at Amazon. Accordingly, Internet culture for a large subset of the population is about viral videos and Facebook memes, not free software and innovation at the edge.

This conversation has been going on and off at least since Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost. (text) (video) Is the gentrification of the Internet inevitable — perhaps even desirable? If not, how do we teach about historical online culture to encourage thoughtful discussions about what aspects of that culture are worth preserving and how we might preserve them?

I don’t particularly agree that Kohn is trying to lump together growth and grit. My sense of his concern is that he worries that growth mindset can be easily co-opted because of the focus of modern education on external evaluation. Given that emphasis, Kohn suggests two bad things that can happen.

Improvement becomes about going from “bad” to “good” in the eyes of some external authority, Given Kohn’s longstanding belief that all external evaluation and praise is harmful because it pulls the learner to the wrong goal, he sees a danger that growth becomes mostly about better meeting others’ expectations.

Kohn considers how growth mindset, which is very much an individual response, matches up with another mindset, the one that suggests if things are going badly in my education/life/etc. I as an individual can improve them by changing my attitude. This focus on the individual which in many ways pervades American culture is one, Kohn argues, that makes us less willing to consider the role systems, either because they are poorly designed or because they are seeking the wrong ends, have when poor outcomes happen.

Mindset is, after all, only a mechanism that is more effective or less efffective in helping one meet goals. Kohn seems to believe that without a careful look at systems and structures, growth mindset becomes merely a more efficient path to a bad end.

Several articles in the last several weeks have bemoaned the decline of the web. Yesterday, Alan Levine linked to several of them but then suggested that the web feels fine to him, and Mike Caulfield commented that many of the features we now view as integral to the open web owe their existence to people who perceived problems with the way the web worked and tried to fix them. Mike notes that comments and RSS and WordPress were all attempts to fix something about the web that was not quite right. I’d add Facebook to that list.

( I’ll give you a moment to recover from your swoon or fit of rage)

Just as the comment box tried to solve the problem of conversation or RSS tried to solve the problem of curation, Facebook tried to solve a problem, “How do I use the web to connect to a group of people that is important to me?” For lots of people, especially non-early-adopters, this is a more important to solve than how to curate information. There’s a reason Facebook has billions of users. For many people, the ease with which the web allows them to connect to other people is more important that the ease with which it allows them to manage information. People like Alan have, for a long time, reminded anyone who would pay attention of the importance of story, even on the web. What makes a story uniquely compelling? The characters. Story is so important and so powerful because it puts people (or aliens, or anthropomorphized animals, you get the idea) at the center. Something like Facebook or Google+, in its own convoluted way, is an effort to put personal connection at the center of the web.

So, why do most of the people I know love RSS and hate Facebook? Because Facebook did its problem solving in a non-open way, encouraging people to trade their data for “free web hosting and PHP doodads,” as Eben Moglen put it. To anyone who can install fedwiki on a VPS using npm, the bargain Moglen describes seems as bad a deal as he says it is. To people without those skills, the deal doesn’t seem as bad. Companies like Reclaim Hosting and Known are doing great work lowering the entry threshold so that more people can manage their own digital identity and realize how bad Facebook’s deal is.

Even so, the open web tools are great for digital homesteading, and not as great for networking. Tools like Known or other IndieWeb implementations are focusing on POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and trying to leverage the network effects of proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter rather than supplant them.

The existence and success of those proprietary platforms is an effort to solve another “problem” with the web, how to make money off of it. The Vox article to which Alan links addresses this issue directly. Most web users seem unwilling to pay for content or for their own hosting. Ergo, we end up with the system of data harvesting we have.

Would the web be better if the problems of social networking and monetization were solved in an open way? Of course it would. Goodness knows people have tried the former. Remember friendica, diaspora, appleseed, etc. Sites like ChangeTip are trying to solve the latter Hopefully someone will succeed eventually.

My sense is that most of the distress over the decline of the web is actually well founded concern that the key problems of the web in 2015 are being solved in proprietary ways that create huge walled gardens rather than with open federated protocols. That is, in fact, the key problem to solve.

I have a pair of tweens at home. The younger one went to a 100 girls of code workshop this week. Since the focus of the introductory level is putting together a web page, I decided it was time to unpark domains for her and her brother that I’ve been sitting on for about a year.

This raises the question, “What do I want my kids to know about digital footprint/ cyber infrastructure /etc?” I threw this out into social media and haven’t gotten much response yet, so as an exercise I’m imagining what a MOOC on these topics, designed for middle school age students, might be like.

At this point I see the MOOC becoming more rhizomatic. Each participant needs to decide what they want their digital identity to represent. Family history buffs might install a genealogy web app. Students might have a bookmark manager, and so forth.

How

Finally, learners put their plans into action. They choose their tools and learn to use them.

This is a very rough first outline. I’ve posted it at my fedwiki site, so you may fork there or comment here. What did I forget? What would you use to deliver such a thing?